Apple’s Phil Schiller says App Store approval process is necessary

Apple’s senior vice-president for worldwide product marketing Phil Schiller defended Apple’s app store approval process, which has gotten dinged by developers who find it too opaque, occasionally leading to seemingly arbitrary rejections or apps landing in limbo land with no word on their progress.

In an interview with Businesweek, Schiller said Apple’s role in gate-keeping for the app store is necessary to ensure that the consumer experience is solid and trustworthy.

“We’ve built a store for the most part that people can trust,” he says. “You and your family and friends can download applications from the store, and for the most part they do what you’d expect, and they get onto your phone, and you get billed appropriately, and it all just works.”

Schiller said most apps are approved but of the ones that are rejected, 90 percent are for technical reasons while 10 percent are sent back because the content is inappropriate.

He said Apple is trying to become more flexible and is also working to improve its approach to trademark content, especially when it comes to issues of device compatibility. The issue was raised recently when Rogue Amoeba’s Airfoil Speakers app was rejected for using images of Apple products to denote what device was providing music for the external speakers.

Apple has also instituted parental controls in the App Store so parents can block content for minors. He said that has opened up the store to a wider array of content.

Despite occasional stories of unhappy developers, Apple’s App Store has been a huge success. It’s zoomed past 100,000 apps in the store and is receiving about 10,000 submissions a week. That’s an amazing number if you think about it.

Apple might consider just giving people automatic approval just to avoid the huge workload involved in reviewing all these apps. In the future, Apple might get more backlash from developers who get approved but have to wait an unreasonably long time than from the few that get rejected. In either case, more transparency would certainly help though it’s unclear if Apple is making big strides in that department.

So what do you think? Is Apple harming its relationship with developers with its approval process and its role as gate-keeper or does it make sense to maintain this role and ensure that everything works?